S2 Ep 1. How a Prank Turned Tragic: Nurse Jacintha Saldanha's Unfortunate Story

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Pranks and practical jokes. We all love them. They're funny. There are whole YouTube channels dedicated just to those. But have you ever thought what happens if a prank or practical joke goes wrong? Could it really cost somebody their lives or their livelihood? Join me as I examine the case of Jacintha Saldana.

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and the practical joke played on the Royal Family on this episode of True Crime, Authors, and Extraordinary People.

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Welcome to True Crime, Authors and Extraordinary People, the podcast where we bring two passions together. The show that gives new meaning to the old adage, truth is stranger than fiction. And reminding you that there is an extraordinary person in all of us. Here is your host, David McClam. What's good everybody and welcome to True Crime, Authors and Extraordinary People. Of course, I'm your man.

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David McClam, hey if you guys haven't already, make sure you follow us on all of our social media. One link to a link tree will get you every link you need to have pertaining to the show. All right, so welcome to season two. It is September 5th, and if you're keeping up, it is also the one year anniversary for True Crime and Authors now retitled True Crime, Authors, and Extraordinary People.

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I wanna give some thanks real quick as you hear at the top of the show, the new voice of the show, the new introduction. Let's thank Jackie. Jackie voice is a great person to deal with and work with. She came through for me and recreating this brand new intro. I hope that you guys do like it. She will be with me from now, probably to the end of time. So thanks Jackie, you do incredible work, very easy to work with.

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Also, as you can see the brand new artwork that's done by my man Arslan. Arslan created this new artwork for me and it looks fabulous. I hope that you guys also like it. He goes by MoamzabJ over on Fiverr. These two are the brand new to my camp. I told you guys the story of why I had to change all of my people around me that did work for me.

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Go back and listen to the end of season one if you guys missed that. But still remaining is my girl Sophie Wilde. Sophie created the intro that you hear Jackie reciting. It says be in her now because I added a little pit at the end, I about remember this, a story-naked person, all of us. But I drew a blank. I had written everything for Day With Crime. And when it came to true crime and authors, I drew a blank. So I reached out to Sophie Wilde, who's a script writer.

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So some of these True Crime podcasts that you do here, they have script writers. Well, that's what Sophie does. She writes whole episode scripts for shows, but I went to her and said, hey, I don't need a script, but I do need an intro. And it was something that she had never done before. So we came together, got this wonderful intro, and now I think she's added that to her actual services now. So we experienced something new together. Jackie Arslan.

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and Sophie, thank you, what an incredible team. If you guys did any work done around these type of things, intros or voice artists, work for your podcast ArtWise, as well as script writers or introduction writers, I got the team for you. All of the information will be linked down in the show notes of the podcast. This is also why you always hear me say ours or we when it's by myself because I do represent

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as far as I'm concerned, my whole entire team. And these three are a vital part of that. Also, I want to say to everyone who's been with me from the beginning for the last 12 months, thank you, thank you, thank you. I appreciate you guys tuning in every week. You are truly the lifeblood of the podcast. And I look forward to what you guys are gonna hear in season two. And if you are brand new,

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This is the first episode that you've heard or you went back over the time I was away and tried to catch up on some season one episodes. Welcome. You guys are in for a ride. This is the show that I kind of brand as three shows in one because of the three segments. And I hope that everybody listening, especially you guys that are due, get something out of the podcast episodes.

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All right, with that being said, let's move on to the first case of season two. If you guys recall, the beginning of season one, I did a little bit of a fun one when we talked about the McDonald's Monopoly scam. Well, this was around a prank, but it's gonna be a little bit more serious because we all like pranks, but sometimes pranks take on a life of their own and they don't turn out the way in which we've intended them to.

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So today we're going to talk about Jacintha Saldana and the prank that was pulled on King Edward VII's hospital in Westminster, London when Catherine the Duchess of Cambridge was there. For those of you that are new, and this is a reminder for those of you that are old, how we do things around here, I do have a Wikipedia page that I'll pull up to tell you this story. However, I have done extensive research into the case.

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And I like to go back and fill in the holes of Wikipedia because they definitely don't have all of the facts in most cases. I have this so that you guys have something to go back and reference to, but I do pull information from various articles, TV shows, and things of that nature. And I do come back and prove you guys a lot of times that I have done more research than what I am reading. So I just don't read this to you. I do have context behind it as well as research. When it comes to this case,

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There wasn't a whole lot of things out there, so I had to piece a lot of things together from various articles that I did find as well as YouTube videos. So here we go. A little bit about Jacintha Saldana. She was 46 years old at the time that all of this went down. She was born in Surva, India, and had lived in the Sultanate of Oman for several years before she decided to move to England around 2002. In December of 2012,

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She was staying in nurses quarters at her London workplace for the sake of convenience, while her family, which consisted of her husband, a 16 year old son, and a 14 year old daughter lived in Bristol. Okay, so that was a little bit about her. She went to London from all accounts because she was a nurse wanting to work there, and it was easier for her to get back and forth to this wonderful job that she had at this hospital that she loved so much.

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So what happened? Here's what went down with this prank call. On December 4th at about 5.30 a.m. London time or 4.30 p.m. Sydney time, the hosts of the Hot 30 Countdown radio program, Mel Craig and Mike Christian called the hospital and spoke to the main nurse, which was Jacintha Saldana. Impersonating the queen, Elizabeth II,

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Craig said, Oh, hello there. Could I please speak to Kate, please, my granddaughter? And Jacintha responded, Oh yes, hold on ma'am. And transferred the call to the judges' nurse who spent approximately two minutes speaking with Craig as well as Christian, the latter impersonating the Prince of Wales. The host used what were later described as ridiculous comedy accents. If you guys hear this call, which later on,

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down the line, I'm going to play you a clip of an interview that has part of this call in here. So you may agree with me. It was the worst accents I had ever heard. I didn't think that she sounded like the queen and I didn't think that he sounded anything like Prince Charles. And it was meant to be a comedy prank that they were pulling at the time.

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So the stunt was broadcast on December 5th after it had been cleared by the radio station's lawyers. When hospital chief executive John Lofthouse learned of the prank call, he condemned it as an act of journalistic trickery that no nurse should have to deal with. The CEO of Southern Cross Austereo, Reese Holleran, later claimed that station officials had made at least five attempts to contact the two nurses in the recording prior to green lighting the call.

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for broadcast with Sydney University law professor Barbara McDonald noting that his comments showed the station already understood they needed to get consent to air the interview and they failed to do so. So what that told me is that they had to call back, they had to talk to Jacintha Saldana and they had to talk to the other nurse. Now the other nurse was the charge nurse that was in charge.

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of Catherine the Duchess of Cambridge. So when people called in and wanted to know anything, the family, whatever, this was her personal nurse. She was actually the nurse that started giving information to who she believed was the queen at that time. But even though the radio station could not get ahold of Jacintha or the other nurse to gain their consent, they decided to go ahead and air this prank.

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anyways which they should not have done and they were warned that they should not have done that but they did anyway. So on December 6th the radio station issued a brief apology for any inconvenience caused by their actions although Christian continued to promote the royal prank on Twitter neither Jacintha Saldana nor the other nurse were disciplined or suspended by the hospital

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And St. James's place also indicated that they did not blame the nurses for their part in the incident. So what ended up happening is, because this is kind of backwards, after they greenlit or after they aired this prank, and they found out some of the repercussions, it turns out that Mel Craig and Mike Christian, I guess, was concerned that people would lose their jobs.

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But right after same James place came out and said, no one's going to lose their job over any of this. Then Mike Christian and male Craig started to celebrate this prank. They were saying things like, this is the easiest prank that we ever pulled off because their expectations were, was that they thought that they would go on there. They would try to do these fake ridiculous accents and that they would be told, stop calling here.

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and they would get hung up on. And of course, like DJs do, they would be on the air, laugh about it, giggle about it, and go, well, we didn't get through with that. So according to them, they were just as shocked as anybody when they were patched through to the Duchess of Cambridge's room. But now that this prank is out here, what do you guys think took place? So now it's a joke.

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And now just sent us feels really bad. And she feels that she has now breached security. She doesn't understand how she could be so careless to let that through. People's making fun of her. The hospital for what I've read did not handle this correctly at all. So they didn't not reprimand any of the employees. They didn't say, let this go. They didn't say, let's not make fun of anybody. So it turns out that Jacinta was getting calls and she was getting threats at some point.

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and she was getting made fun of. Even though some people took the joke that Prince Charles made about it, as a joke, she took it as a dig on her. Now, even if the whole comment and everything was going on wasn't 100% targeted at Jacintha, again, people, we have to look at perception. And if you are the person that handled this first, you're gonna feel that way.

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Cause she's the nurse that answered the phone, not the nurse that gave the information. Okay, so she had, as far as she was concerned, the power to say no and hang up this call. Now the one thing to keep in mind is, now that she's patched this call through, it goes off to Captain Judges of Cambridge's charge nurse. That nurse doesn't have to identify anything anymore cause she's already believing

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who's ever working that switchboard at the front has already done the job of vetting the person before they get to her. So take a guess what that nurse did. Being that she didn't have to vet anyone, being that she was told that it was the Queen of England on the phone to check on her granddaughter, she starts divulging personal information to quote unquote the Queen.

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All that male Craig asked was, I just wanted to check up on my granddaughter to see how her tummy bug is doing. And this nurse just went forward with hydration and she's got more fluids and everything that they were doing. Again, that added to the ridicule of what Jacinta Saldana was going through. The radio station now has to take some responsibility, you would think.

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because it is their call to air that. From everything else I read, the only thing that Mel and Mike wanted to air was them getting through and the response that they got when they tried to get through to Catherine's room. For what I've read, it was the station's decision to air the charge nurse's whole response that included all of this personal medical information.

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I don't know about the laws in England, but over here, the HIPAA laws would prevent you from saying these things and could be brought about criminal charges. Now that all this is going on, she thinks she's become the laughing stock of at least England, now is nationwide because they're putting this stuff all over Twitter and YouTube and every place else, cracking up about this joke. What do you think could possibly happen next?

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What happened next folks is tragic. On the morning of December 7th of 2012, Jacintha Saldana was found dead by security and other staff in her nurse's quarters at the hospital. She had died by suicide and also had injuries. It was reported that Jacintha had left three handwritten notes, one of which blamed the radio stunt for her death. Another note discussed her wishes for funeral arrangements.

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while the third was directed at her employer, criticizing their handling of events that followed the prank call. Now please allow me to fill in some holes that is very vague that I found out during research. Now according to Wikipedia, it just says that she was found dead and she had injuries. It didn't really give you the method of that or what the other injuries were. So it turns out that Jacintha

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had hung herself and she had cuts on her wrist, which was indicating that she had tried to either cut her wrist, she had been cutting her wrist, she was thinking about committing suicide by cutting the wrist, maybe felt like it was too painful or too slow, and then she hung herself. More devastating to all of that, at least for the hospital should be at least, is that she hung herself.

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and the accommodations that they give to the nurses. So she was on the hospital ground when she did that. Now this was three days after the print call was made. So it wasn't long. She dealt with this for three days before she finally said she couldn't do it anymore. Now the other thing is she told you why she committed suicide. A lot of people don't want to

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acknowledged that because it said that she left three handwritten notes, which one of them called out that the prank call was one of the reasons why she did it. Now what I want to do is step back to one thing I didn't read because now it fits in here because these are things that they were quick to want to come out and make sure you knew to take some of the owners off of the hospital. So the first thing the family did come out right away.

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because they didn't want anybody to be confused or come up and say she has some type of mental illness. So they came out right away and said that she did not have any history of mental illness or depression of any kind, and she was not on any medication for depression. Now I don't know where they got this from, but it was later down the line revealed by multiple news sources that this was not Jacintha's first time.

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that she had attempted suicide two times previously before now, and that she was taking antidepressants. Why does the times that she's tried it before matter now? They don't give you a timeline of when those times were. They didn't say it was last week, last month, three years ago. Apparently, Jacinta was living a good life until this happened.

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She had no thoughts of suicide. She wasn't cutting herself. She wasn't doing anything she shouldn't do. All the people she worked with, all her friends and family says that she was the life of the party. She didn't suffer from anything. So as far as I'm concerned, these other attempts don't matter. This was just a way of trying to gaslight the situation and say, well look, before you wanna blame us for it, just keep in mind, she did try this two other times.

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but the handwritten note for me is what kills it. Now they don't have a copy of it, I haven't seen it, but by research I've done and from Mel Craig's own mouth, she listed Mel Craig and Mike Christian specifically in her suicide note of why she had chosen to kill herself.

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I don't know how it ever make you guys feel, but I would be jarred from here until the end of time if somebody came and told me, hey, so and so committed suicide, here's a note and your name's all up in it. I think that will haunt me for the rest of time. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to let you hear that for yourself. So I'm going to play you a clip of an interview that was done by Mel Craig.

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just about a year ago, or at least it was uploaded a year ago, but it does look like it was very recent because Mel Craig looks very different and she looks like, you know, she's aged since this time, so it does look like it was very recent that this went up about a year ago. I want you to pay attention to what she says, how she says it, and then you will hear a little clip of what that call was.

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I do want to thank SBS Insight for this clip because it was theirs and it was their interview. So here you go. Did you enjoy this job? Yeah, it was my dream job. I'd worked 20 years to get that job. I interviewed the world's biggest celebrities. What happened that December? It was when the Duchess of Cambridge was admitted to hospital with severe morning sickness that ended up being her pregnancy announcement as well. And

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In the media, you always look for an angle. What are we gonna do to cover the story? And someone had an idea, let's do a prank call. The aim with this prank call though, was to pretend to be the Queen and Prince Charles, do terrible accents and see how quickly we could be hung up on. And unfortunately, the nurse that took the call transferred us immediately to the private nurse that was looking after the Duchess of Cambridge. Let's have a listen to some of that call.

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Hello, good morning King Edward VII of Clea. Oh hello there, could I please speak to Cage please, my granddaughter? Oh yes, just hold on now. Thank you.

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Are you putting us through? Yes. Kate, my darling, are you there? Good morning, mum. This is the nurse speaking. How may I help you? Hello, I'm just after my granddaughter, Kate. I want to see how her little tummy bug is going. Mel, what was the initial response to the prank? The initial response to the prank was people found it funny. Prince Charles even made a joke.

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about the call. We had the hospital talk out saying there would be no consequences towards the nurses that were involved, that it was a stupid prank. When we realised there wasn't going to be anything wrong, that no one was going to be fired, we started to celebrate it. On Friday, you heard some pretty shocking news. I was asleep and my partner at the time started to get all these tweets saying she's got blood on her hands, she's killed someone and then I got a phone call confirming.

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that Jacinta Saldana had taken her own life. This is the nurse who picked up the phone call. Yeah. How did you react to that news? I don't remember the next six hours of my life. It was instant grief and regret and remorse.

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It was just an awful situation to think that I was responsible for someone's death. Were you scared for your safety at that time? At the time I wasn't scared for my safety because I thought maybe I did deserve to die for what I did. My partner was standing on the balcony fearful that I was going to jump off. The nurse too, Mel, named you and your co-host in her suicide note. That was the hardest thing because now I understand suicide more and what the situation was.

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but nothing will change the fact that someone wrote my name and thought of me before they took their own life. And that was very hard to deal with. All right, now that you've heard that, let me go ahead and tell you the rest of what happened as far as if there's gonna be any legal revocations. And then I'll kind of reference back to what you heard Mel say as to probably why that's not gonna be, because she tells you how she feels. If you can hear it, she feels very remorseful. She didn't know it was gonna take on the life that it did.

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She even let you know, hey, we didn't start celebrating this until we found out that everybody was going to be okay. Nobody was going to lose a job. None of that was going to take place. Then she got the call that Friday morning that just sent the had killed herself. So what happens slightly after just sent the killed herself. So following news of Josephus, I'll Donald suicide, our stereo CEO, Reese Holleran said that Craig and Christian were both deeply shocked.

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and would not return to their radio show until further notice. A day later, as advertisers boycotted or threatened to boycott the station, 2Day FM suspended all advertising indefinitely. On December 10th, Craig and Christian gave their first interviews since Saldana's death, telling Nine Networks, A Current Affair, and Seven Networks Today Tonight that they were still badly shaken over the tragedy.

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If you see those clips, because I seen a little portion of it, they both do look like they're very distraught and sad. So it didn't look like that they took this as a laughing matter after they found out what went down. So advertising on 2DayFM resumed 13th of December with a stereo announcing that it would donate the remainder of station advertising proceeds for 2012, a minimum of $500,000 to a memorial fund to benefit Jacinta Saldana's family.

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Osterio also canceled his annual Christmas party for employees in Sydney and donated the funds for the party to the nonprofit organizations Beyond Blue and Lifeline. On January 27, 2013, Osterio announced that the Hot 30 countdown was canceled. Mike Christian returned to work in February and won Osterio's Top Jack Award in June 2013 for his work on Fox FM and Melbourne while Craig remained off air.

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Mail Craig later sued Osterio for failure to provide a safe workplace, and the lawsuit was settled in December 2013. As part of the settlement, Osterio made a public statement that Mail Craig was not responsible for the decision to air the hoax call and had suggested that it be edited before broadcast. Mail Craig found work in advertising after leaving Osterio, but in 2016 returned to radio work in Wollongong, south of Sydney.

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Mel Craig revealed that she became the target of online bullies following the prank and became a contributor for anti-bullying campaigns. Let me tell you what I find is all wrong with that whole thing. If you listen to what I read, it seemed like that they reverted back and they wanted to put all the blame now on Mel Craig. Mel Craig definitely suffered the most out of all of this because Mike Christian got to walk back into the station. He got his job back.

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He was Jock of the Year. And then they come out in a statement and said that they wanted to be publicly known that it was not Mel Craig's decision to air the prank, but the station's. It was both of their idea. Mel Craig and Mike Christian both came up and said, we think it'd be funny to play this. Why is Mel Craig the only one that's suffering from all of this?

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This kind of reminds me of the whole entire thing with Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson, with the whole entire what they called nipple gate at the Super Bowl years ago. It was both of their idea to do the stunt, but the stunt was supposed to turn out the way that it did. But in the end, Justin Timberlake's career soared and he was invited back to the Super Bowl and he made record after record after record and he made money.

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while Janet Jackson, one of the biggest female name and artists in the world suffered. Alienated, not asked back, record sales declined, had to go off on her own trying to put her own identity back together over a stunt that went wrong. You would have thought that she went out there and said, you know what, Justin, I want you to go ahead and yank this, and when you do, my bare breast is gonna come out. I want it that way. That is not what happened.

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It took years for Justin Timberlake to come back and apologize to Janet Jackson about the way he handled things and if it was handled. This reminds me of that. But let me tell you some things that Wikipedia don't tell you about Mel Craig. You probably picked up a little bit of it in her interview, but it goes deep. She had a hard time for a long time finding a job. When she went to other stations to apply, and even if she did get hired,

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The moment they found out that she was one of the DJs that pulled the prank, they yanked her job off and ripped up her contract. She was the target of bullying for a long time. When I mean bullying, I don't mean ha ha ha, you a punk because you wouldn't did this. No, we talking about death threats. How could you? Why you still alive? You need to die. She also contemplated committing suicide herself.

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on many occasions. You heard her say, hey, my partner was concerned and thought that I was just going to jump off the balcony. There is another interview I found where she does say that she contemplated suicide. She did not want to continue to live because she felt that she cost somebody else their life and she didn't want to go on anymore if that person wasn't here because of her. If you ask me.

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Mel Craig gave more of a damn about what happened to Jacinta Saldana than Mike Christian did. Cause I haven't seen an interview with him. He hasn't said boo about this since they did the initial interview after that where they all said that they were very very sorry. Action speaks louder than words. Mel Craig has paid the brunt of the debt for this death and for this prank.

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As far as I'm concerned, Mike Christensen, he has skated off into the limelight and he didn't suffer nearly as much as he should have. If you ask me what should have happened, they both should have been terminated. They both should have just been fired because that should violate some kind of ethical policy or something.

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I know over here in the States, at least for the couple I work for, there's all kinds of apologies written about things we can do, things we can't say, and things of that nature. And if we do, we know it's a violation and we could be fired. But I will tell you this, not everybody in Australia was happy that Mike Christian bounced back so quick. Here's a statement that was made.

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by Stephen Conroy, who said in June 2013, Southern Cross Austereo awarded Christian the next Top Jock Award, a decision that was criticized in the Australian media. Australian National Communications Minister Stephen Conroy told a Melbourne radio station, and I quote, I think there's a bit of bad taste involved there. There were some very serious consequences of what was a prank and to be seen to be rewarding people so soon after such an event.

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I think is just in bad taste. And then as we, the only thing we know left that happened to him was in 2015. That's when he returned to to the FM as a staff announcer where he is now. We don't know, but I don't think he cared as much as male cared. I don't, I know he did not suffer as much as male did now here. People is how pranks work. They have consequences.

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I know they're funny and we love them and YouTube is full of them. Man, there's some pranks I used to listen to that I'm still here going, Ooh, that kind of went over a little bit. I'll give you a couple real quick. You never heard of them. Now, Steve Harvey has a show called the Steve Harvey in the morning show. Steve Harvey has his nephew, nephew Tommy. One of nephew Tommy's biggest segments is that he plays practical jokes on people.

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Now I think these practical jokes could be far worse than the jokes that we just learned about that was played on the hospital in Jacinta, South Donna. I say that because these jokes are actually done with the knowledge of somebody who knows the person getting pranked, whether it's a family member or whether it's a husband or wife, they're in on it. Now I know there's prank shows, we watch one now.

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with Johnny Knoxville, but that's in a controlled environment. They don't let the prank go too far. They make sure everybody is safe. And if things begin to go awry, they end the prank right away. Not the case with nephew Tommy. Let me give you two such instances where I feel like the prank could have went wrong. And there's been a couple I've listened to where at the very end when he introduces himself and says,

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that the person says, nephew Tommy, one day somebody gonna find you and gonna whip your butt. So one of the pranks I was listening to was a wife pranking her husband. Now how these things usually work is they call her Tommy and they say, I want you to prank my husband and here's what we've been going through, right? So they're holding on something that they've been going through that was touching to the person or something that they know would trigger the person.

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if you bought it up, like hurting a spouse or hurting a parent or child or something like that to get their juices going. In this case, this particular couple was having problems conceiving. So after round after round after round of in vitro, she finally gets pregnant. So I'm gathering what she told nephew Tommy is, yeah, we've been having problems getting pregnant. I'm finally pregnant. So I want you to use that and let, let's prank him. Well, nephew Tommy comes up with.

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that he's gonna call this guy who obviously is a white guy because of what you hear later where I can make that distinction. And he's gonna prank this guy and tell this gentleman that he got the number from the doctor's office but the doctor used the wrong specimen in his wife. So he pretty much says, yeah man, I got your number from the doctor. I just wanna let you know, I heard that your wife is pregnant. And the guy's like, yeah man, yeah, finally after all this time, I'm happy.

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we finally gonna have a baby. And he's like, yeah man, yeah man, yeah man, I'm happy for you, but that could be our baby. And so you hear the dude just, what you mean, our baby? Are you trying to tell me that my wife would cheat him? Nah man, nothing like that. I got your number from the doctor because my wife and your wife both sees the same doctor. And the doctor called me and let me know that he accidentally used the wrong specimen.

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So basically what I'm telling you man is the baby your wife is carrying is mine. I'm your wife's baby daddy. So this dude just explodes. What you mean that she pregnant with somebody else's and you mean that how you mean the doctor made this mistake? Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. You said baby daddy. Are you black? Now what jar me out of that is you go from being upset.

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that the doctor used the wrong specimen, but it registered in your head for some reason that the dude used the term baby daddy and then you shift on a dime and now you're upset because the guy's black. These pranks people can also expose people. I'm not saying people shouldn't be exposed, but if they're exposed against their will, no, it is kind of unfair and this could cause people jobs because this guy goes off on this tangent and he is trying so hard.

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hard not to act like he's racist and not to drop the N-bomb. Several times he was about to use the N-word and you hear him completely shift and try to say another word real quick. But he's going off, but how I can believe that my wife is having some black man's kid and you a stupid ass bastard and I'm gonna find you and when I do, I'm gonna kill you and I'm gonna.

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do this and that, I can't believe she having a black, I mean, he wanted this black kid tangent forever. Now, if it was me, I wouldn't be thrilled, but my first thing is gonna be, okay, look, me need to find out, first of all, why this doctor's that careless, and let's get a suit going. Then we need to figure out if there's any way to reverse this, if not, dude, we just gonna have to learn to love this kid because I don't know what else to do. Because the way he's positioning the prank is,

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Since his wife was impregnated with the wrong specimen, so was nephew Tommy's wife, which means she's having this white dude's baby. So finally, nephew Tommy decides to stop the bleeding after this guy's going way off the rails. He introduces himself, hey man, this is nephew Tommy, see if I'm on the show, you just got pranked by your wife, yada, yada, yada. Now this dude does a complete flip. Really, I've been pranked?

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And you can hear in his voice like, oh man, I was going off on this whole racial tangent. Is this being recorded? And I think at one point he said, man, did you get me on radio? And every time he said, no, no, no, man, not yet. But it's gonna go up in the morning. Now, just in case you guys wanna go back and go, well, he didn't get consent. That was consent. When nephew Tommy said, this will be going on the radio show in the morning, that guy at that point could have said, I don't want it to be aired. You don't put me on the radio.

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and then they would have had to oblige that. Or he could have called into the station later and said the same thing, but none of that took place. The second one I give you could have caused divorce, could have caused somebody's death, could have caused somebody bodily harm. This prank from nephew Tommy, I think, took about a whole two weeks to do. Somebody's cousin calls in, I believe it was a cousin, and says that they wanted to prank her cousin.

38:24
and her husband is extremely jealous. And she just wanted to pay her back for something. So she wanted to go off with this whole thing about having a guy that admired her sending things to the house. Well, Tommy took that to the next level. So what he did was she gave him her address phone number. He went out and bought some brand new fresh clean underwear.

38:53
packed these in a box with a little love note, sent the box off to this lady's house. Lady receives box, opens up, finds mail underwear. Well, I guess her husband was also there at some point and found out about this box too. A couple days later, Tommy calls with whatever fake name that he was using at the time he put on there. He said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, this is so and so. Did you get my package?

39:24
And at first you hear her go, you know, package. She goes, oh, oh, were you the one that was sending me the drawers and the mail? She said, oh, yeah, yeah, you got them, you got them. I'm glad you got those. And she was like, why are you sending me these? You know, I've been admiring you for such a long time and across the way and I wanted to send you something just so that you could think about me. And she goes on, you know, to say, man, you know, I'm married, I got kids.

39:49
You know, I got two boys and a husband. If I needed to see somebody's drawers, I would just go look at theirs. You gonna have me in divorce court because my husband is thoroughly convinced that I'm cheating on him. Oh, you married? I didn't know that, I'm sorry. I didn't really wanna cause no distress or anything like that. And she's just going off, yeah man, this been hailed at my house for the last past 14 days. This fool's talking about divorcing me and he wants to know who I'm messing with and there's nothing I can do that can convince him.

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that I'm not doing anything. So you need to bring your boy over here and let him know what's going on. He said, no, I don't want no confrontation. He goes, but all I wanna know is this, I'm really into you. He goes, I'll tell you what I'll do. I sent you a pair of my underwear. So if you send me a pair of yours, I'll call this done. And at first he's like.

40:39
Are you a fool? And then she swears, she goes, Oh, you know what, I'll bring them to you. Give me your address. I'm gonna bring them to you. I'll bring them over. He goes, I don't want no confidence. She says, Oh, no, no, no. You got my address. It's only fair that I get yours. I'm gonna come over there. I'm gonna give you, I'm gonna hand deliver these to you. Maybe I'll let my husband bring them and hand deliver them to you. And so he's like, no, I don't want none of that. I don't want none of that. And so after she goes off for a while, he finally breaks character and says, Oh, this is nephew Tommy from the Steve Harvey Morning Show. You've been pranked by so and so.

41:08
A year ago, I'm going to get her and you know, he's like, no, baby, this is all a prank. Tell your man to calm down. We'll reach out to him. But you know, he, she's like, man, my husband's convinced that I've been cheating on him. I got this box of your underwear now in a man's mind, but we probably should have been thinking of, but we ain't going to think that way because we're in the heat of that moment. If anybody looked at these underwear, you would tell that these were brand new underwear off the shelf.

41:36
Usually with something like this is going down a person don't go buy a brand new pair of underwear for that occasion They send you a pair that they already own but we don't think about that when we are in the heat of Whatever is going on So I think in the end they were able to convince him. It was a prank I think the cousin came over and told him that it was a prank and that was all good But look at how bad those could have went

42:01
You could have had an angry white dude really looking for some black guy to kill him, even though it wasn't his fault. He could have went back and killed the doctor. Anything could have happened. In this case, you don't know what this man thinks with the woman that has a husband. You don't know if he's abusive. You don't know if he has been abusive. You don't know if he has abusive tendencies. Why are you pulling a prank off for 14 different days and no one's saying this was a prank?

42:29
She could have been dead, she could have gotten beaten up, she could have lost her marriage. You don't know what could have happened. So sometimes prank calls that we do and pranks that we pull that's so funny don't always turn out the way we want them to or the way they should. And in the case of Jacintha Saldana, unfortunately, that is what happened. Now she passed away from suicide because she was targeted.

42:57
by people and made fun of and couldn't handle it anymore. She left behind at that time her 16 year old son and her 14 year old daughter and her husband who now had to carry on life without her because of some ill prank that somebody decided to pull and thought was funny. Not to mention, what did the husband go through? They live in Bristol. So you start going through, maybe if I was there I could have saved her.

43:25
You know, maybe she would have called me on the phone, all kinds of things, because now he says it's his fault, which it is not. So the end point of this is, be careful what pranks that we pull. I'm thoroughly convinced that one day somebody's gonna be waiting for Nephew Tommy on the outside, and they gonna try to kill him. If you guys don't believe how in-depth and treacherous some of these pranks are, go look up Nephew Tommy on YouTube. They're all over the place. They even have a compilation called The Best of Nephew Tommy, and they run

43:55
two, three hours long. I mean, some of these he's pulled on churches and church leaders. I mean, it's all kinds of pranks. In this day and age, we cannot do that because everything is literally taken way too seriously. I hope Jacintha Saldana rest in peace. She definitely was gone too soon. I don't want anybody to think that she was a weak-minded person because sometimes what happens is the strongest minded people become weak-minded based on the things

44:23
that they are going through every day. If I put each and every one of you in a box and said I want you to think of the most horrendous moment of your life and I make that moment replay for you in this box 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, I almost guarantee you no matter how strong will or strong minded you are, that's going to break you down and eventually you're just going to say I can't take this anymore and the only way out is well to kill yourself.

44:55
I wish her family well, I know this has been a number of years now, but the pain will never ever ever go away. And what happened with those two DJs will never go away, and Mel will never get through living this down because again, she's the one that's paying the heaviest price. So be careful what we do guys, and remember that everything that we think is funny,

45:24
at the time could have dire and deadly consequences.

45:33
All right, I think you guys were tuning in for that one. That was the first case of season two. I hope you guys enjoyed it. We have a lineup coming down the line for you all this season with some great and extraordinary people that's gonna be coming your direction starting next week. So I'll let the first person be a surprise of who you get. Just look out for that because it will be coming. And just remember if you wanna hear this episode as well as the rest of season two,

46:02
and the complete backlog of season one ad free, you can do so by following the link to Supercast. You get seven day free trial to try it out before you commit to that $5 a month price. But everything would be ad free there and you will also get the episodes dropped early just to Supercast listeners. Also remember we do have a Patreon as well so if you wanna see any of the interviews that I conduct, you can see them there as well.

46:33
So the last thing I said to you guys is being that this is September 5th. That means that yesterday, September 4th, my mother has been gone for three years. I keep doing this a lot of her memory and I think about her all the time. And it was funny, like I said, in the end of my season one clip that this podcast took off the day after she passed. So if you guys still have your moms around and you ask for any odds, go settle those. Make sure you call your mom.

47:03
hug your mother because when the day comes and your mom is no longer here no matter how many years it is you will always feel that and you will always wish you can hug her just one more time. So I hope to my mom that she is up there looking down at me and that she is continuously proud of her baby boy in the work that I continue to do.

47:29
Alright guys with that said, I hope you're being good to yourself. I hope you're being safe out there. Always be good to yourself and each other and always remember, always stay humble. An act of kindness can make someone's day. A little love and compassion can go a long way. And remember that there is an extraordinary person in all of us. I'll catch you on the next one.

47:59
Don't forget to rate, comment, and subscribe. Join us on social media. One link to the link tree has it all. Feel free to drop us a line at truecrimeandauthors at gmail.com. Cover art and logo designed by Arslan. Sound mixing and editing by David McClam. Intro script by Sophie Wilde and David McClam. Theme music, legendary, by New Alchemist. Introduction and ending credits by Jackie Voice.

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See you next time on True Crime, Authors, and Extraordinary People.